London is set to offer a rival to New York’s acclaimed High Line park with these competition-winning proposals for a landscaped promenade linking gardens and railways arches along the River Thames.
The competition, set by the RIBA and local organisation Vauxhall One, asked architects to “create an outstanding new addition to the urban environment” within a district of Nine Elms, along the South Bank.
The winning entry from Erect Architecture and landscape architects J&L Gibbons is influenced by the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, an amusement park that was a popular location for promenading and entertainment from the mid seventeenth century to the mid nineteenth century.
A contemporary promenade will link major hubs within the site, with a series of permanent and temporary installations along the route acting as “curiosities” to emulate aspects of Vauxhall’s history.
Rain gardens will provide sustainable drainage along the pathways, which will be composed of different textured paving to provide variety throughout the scheme.
Chris Law, public realm and development director for the Vauxhall BID praised the imagination of the winning entry: “Rain gardens mix with strangely pruned trees to create a real Cabinet of Curiosities. So Vauxhall! Who would have thought that sustainable urban drainage could be so cool!”
The public spaces are located within a larger masterplan for the Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea (VNEB) area, which includes the transformation of Battersea Power Station into a mixed-use development and the building of the new US Embassy.
The park will hope to replicate the popularity of the High Line, which first opened in 2009, with the second section opening in 2011. In a movie filmed on our recent trip to New York, designer Stephen Burks told us that the High Line is helping to transform the architecture of the surrounding areas.
Izvor: Dezeen, 13/6/2013
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